Mechwarrior Online

[Falconeer]

So, looks like October 15th will be official launch, I'd assume. Including Community Warfare most likely. I am basing this on the "Loyalty Points" bonus that comes with the Phoenix 'mechs released on that day.

Loyalty Points

Q: What are Loyalty Points?
A: Loyalty Points are part of the upcoming Community Warfare expansion. Players will be able to work with and/or pledge allegiance to one of the major factions within the game's universe. Loyalty Points are earned by doing a variety of activities within the game. Players will have a pooled loyalty rank value per in-game faction. As the player performs specific actions they will earn loyalty points which are added or removed from these individual faction rank pools. Loyalty Point boosts increase the positive earning of points in these individual boosts. Earning a high level of rank with anyone one faction, earns the player access to specific faction content and economic benefits. Further details will be revealed with upcoming announcements on Community Warfare.

[5150]

The love/hate seems to be the general consensus - that said this is a way better deal that the Founders program was when spin it all out.

Didn't surprise me that they stopped you being able to pick what Mech you got on the lower tiers and the only way to get the BattleMaster is to fork out for the top tier.

[Falconeer]

Hero Victor, "Dragon Slayer", coming next Tuesday, along with the "Sarah" Jenner dedicated to that little mechwarrior girl who recently passed away.




Not sure, but I think it's a shitty screenshot especially when compared with the art.





Also, here is the "Sarah".







All sales on the Sarah will go to the Canadian Cancer Society.

[Ironwood]

That Sarah thing was and is utterly awesome.

The paintjob is an utter winner.

I don't have a Jenner - this one will be purchased.  Oh Yes.

[Falconeer]

I totally agree. I think it's incidentally also gonna be the best looking 'mech out there at the moment. We definitely need less wacky patterns and more tags, flags and insignia.

[satael]

That Sarah thing was and is utterly awesome.

The paintjob is an utter winner.

I don't have a Jenner - this one will be purchased.  Oh Yes.

The Sarah story. A mech with unicorn, rainbow and teddybear badges, how could anyone pass on that? 

[Arthur_Parker]

Yeah, I'll have to buy that, very good cause.

[Lantyssa]

All sales on the Sarah will go to the Canadian Cancer Society.

Thanks for that mention.  It's an awesome paint job, and this just sold it for me.

[Falconeer]

Movement changes.

Okay everybody, listen up - this is important.

The upcoming patch brings with it dramatic changes in the way your mech will interact with sloped ground. Gone are the days of running up a 75° slope as though it was no more than a gentle incline. Mechs will now have to work harder to climb slopes, and the threshold at which slopes cease to be traversable will be considerably lower than it was before.

In this post I will explain exactly how these changes will affect each type of mech, and we will include color-coded maps depicting the severity of the slopes in every level so that we can all have a reference as to where our mechs can go, where our mechs can't go, and where we can expect the mechs to slow down.

For the purposes of these movement changes, there are five movement archetypes. Each one has a different threshold at which its Mechs will begin to slow down. I'll call this SlowdownAngle. The SlowdownAngle is different for each archetype. Here is a list of the archetypes, and which mech belongs in which archetype. You will notice that the archetype does not necessarily coincide with the mech's weight class.

Tiny: Jenner, Commando, Spider
SlowdownAngle: 40°

Small: Raven, Cicada
SlowdownAngle: 35°

Medium: Blackjack, Centurion, Dragon, JagerMech, Trebuchet, Cataphract, Hunchback
SlowdownAngle: 30°

Large: Quickdraw, Stalker, Awesome, Catapult
SlowdownAngle: 25°

Huge: Atlas, Highlander, Victor
SlowdownAngle: 20°

In addition to the SlowdownAngle, there is a slope level which no mech can traverse. That angle is 45°. For an easy reference as to which slopes are 45°, take a look at Alpine Peaks. Where you see white snow, the slope is less than 45°. Where you see dark coloured rock, the slope is greater than 45°, and you cannot climb it.

So, the easy rule to remember is that every mech can travel over any slope less than 20° with no slowdown whatsoever, and at any 45° slope the mech's movement is reduced to 0. These slowdowns aren't instant, so there is the potential for an extremely fast mech to gather enough momentum to travel some way up a slope of 45° or greater, but in most cases a 45° slope acts, in effect, as a wall. In addition, I should also note that running into an actual vertical wall reduces the mech's forward movement considerably, so you will no longer have the ability to navigate by perpetually bumping into stuff.

To compute how much of a slowdown you can expect on a particular slope, the formula is quite simple. Just less than your mech's SlowdownAngle, you'll be going at 100% speed. At 45° you'll be going at 0% speed. In between those two values, the slowdown is linear.

For example, the Catapult is a member of the "large" movement archetype, whose SlowdownAngle is 25°. If a Catapult walks up a slope of 35° (halfway between the SlowdownAngle of 25° and the StopAngle of 45°) it will be traveling at 50% of its normal speed. On a 30° slope it would travel at 75% of its normal speed, and on a 40° slope it would travel at 25% of its normal speed.

Some maps this won't make a lick of difference. Others it will completely transform. I urge everyone to carefully inspect the following diagrams and see if your usual routes or favourite spots are going to be compromised by these changes. You can't climb up the sheer cliff walls on Alpine Peaks any more. You can't scoot up to the top of the crystal shards on Tourmaline Desert any more. The high ground in Canyon Network is nowhere near as accessible as it once was.

It has been my experience that these changes make for a dramatically improved gameplay experience and I hope that will be the case for everyone else too.

Thanks for listening. As you were.

- Thaddeus

Here is a link to the official feedback thread: http://mwomercs.com/...viour-feedback/

Here are the maps:

ALPINE PEAKS




CANYON NETWORK




CAUSTIC VALLEY




FOREST COLONY




FROZEN CITY




RIVER CITY




TOURMALINE DESERT




If you have trouble remembering what areas are navigable while in game, make a rhyme.
Alpine for example: "If it has rock on it - you can't walk on it; if it has snow on it - you can go on it"
Now you will never forget!

[Falconeer]

I don't see why a Cataphract and a Jagermech should be as agile as a Hunchback or a Centurion, but maybe it's me.

[Kageru]

This game was worth playing for stomping around, seeing the pretty awesome weapon effects and explosions. The mech explosions, painting people with lasers and salvos of missiles flying through the air are pretty awesome.

Everything else is lack-luster at best. The game desperately needs more maps over more mech skins. There's no new user story, tutorial or progression. You use up your noobie money to buy a big mech (if you are sensible) and then you grind. Or you just buy it and start game one in your end-game mech. In WoT you start with a huge range of basic tanks, a clear progression on each of them and upgrades for each tank that come relatively quickly at the start. The matches are tiered in what tanks you are going to see and the early levels are some of the most fun. Purchased tanks are limited in that they are not part of the progression and can't be modified.

Game balance is questionable, with much of that being due to adherence to the original rules which weren't designed for a computer game. They put hard-points on the mechs to differentiate variants but they haven't tiered weapons so my 35 ton mech is wielding 2 ERPPC's. No minimum range (broken), highly accurate (no reticle bloom or cone of fire that I could see), massive and focused alpha, the only reason not to is because you make an LRM boat (if the meta favored it) or are big enough to pack AC/20's. Almost every PUG game involves forming a firing line on a ridge (if available) until the enemy can close range. The "default" and trial mechs show what they want, limited heat capacity and varied use of weapons, but players enjoy optimising and that's not what they are going to field. I'm not even sure it's possible to balance such that all weapons are viable, the best they can do is change the current king.

Legalised wall-hack, observed while spectating, is ridiculous. Matches tend to give one sided results, experience gains strongly reinforce doing damage as the focus and with no maintenance costs there's no reason not to be fielding a fully tricked out and high tonnage mech (though trolling in lights is fun).

The mech bay is a pain to work with because you want to see the mech as whole and desperately needs saved configurations. Designing mechs is immensely addictive as always.

I imagine they are doing 3rd person mech view because a lot of people find the juddering and claustrophobic cockpit both authentic and nauseating. Plus the lack of situational awareness that is out of place with a high-tech war machine and hurts noobies who haven't memorised the map.

I imagine community warfare will be a lot like the WoT equivalent. It would be interesting to know what percentage of their player base participates in those. I suspect it's far from the majority.

[Merusk]

Wow that movement changes tons of shit.  Canyon gameplay will never be the same. Guys up top have a clear and significant advantage that the guys below will never get to them.  The one that really will shock people and their current play is River city (you MUST use the bridges to get to upper) and Forest Colony (most of those hills will require jump jets now. A big shift.)

[Kageru]

It will be fun to see how it plays out.. maps with corridors could become killzones, jump jets more valuable and even LRM boats having a lot more potential. It did seem weird you could sort of hump a cliff and end up on top.

[Llyse]

It will be fun to see how it plays out.. maps with corridors could become killzones, jump jets more valuable and even LRM boats having a lot more potential. It did seem weird you could sort of hump a cliff and end up on top.

It's going to be a hectic few weeks while people work out correct routes and game play. I'm worried that the Highlander will receive too big a boost from this but otherwise definitely looking forward to it!

[satael]

So Alpine Peaks and an assault mech will now mean a long slow slog and if the enemy decided to go the other way never meeting them... (especially since splitting up the forces in a pug match usually means being overrun by the other side's full force)

[Falconeer]

These movement changes might cut down the assault population a bit. Beyond that, I really don't feel comfortable commenting since it's too much stuff, so have to test it personally. Going slow and slower, and supposedly having an even harder time defending yourself from lighter 'mechs, or being exposed to ambushes in areas you can't get out of as you could before is not necessarily going to be the kind of fun it used to be for heavier 'mechs. If anything, I expect complains that the game is suddenly less fun because "OMG I CAN'T MOVE THIS IS HORRIBLE! I AM CANCELING MY SUB!!"

I appreciate Kageru's perspectives, although I disagree with parts of it. I don't feel the comparison with WoT is fair in the slightest. First of all because it has been out for three years and had a year of open beta before that. Second, while I loved WoT, I never appreciated how useless lighter tanks were against heavier ones (when I played). There weren't tiered battles at the time, took them a while to add them and similarly we know lots of those "quality of life" changes are already announced for Mechwarrior before the end of Open Beta. So the weapon thing could boil down to personal preference, but WoT had its grace period too before al the features were implemented. You know... including gold ammo...

Weight limited battles are coming. Also, the just announced movement changes are a nerf to heavier mechs. That said, I especially like the fact that all weapons are viable and especially like that depending on your playstyle all mechs and weight categories can be lethal. There are definitely balance issues but recent patches showed big improvements.

Legalised wall-hack (I guess you are referring to the seismic module) is being nerfed with next patch. Trial 'mechs are a stupid crutch while preparing a better introduction for noobs, but this cycle has the Champion Hunchback, quite a great 'mech.

UI 2.0 will change everything, from social tools to the mechlab, to the needed tutorial for noobs.

Community Warfare is not really like World of Tanks' because Faction Play will involve all players, including those who don't plan on conquering territories. If you pledge with a major lore house you won't be fighting for expansion, but you will be contributing to your house's score and will be earning achievements and rewards anyway.

While this game will probably never be really polished, too much is gonna change in the next 4 - 6 months to give it a fair final score now. But at the moment, for a lack-laster game seems to me it's doing extremely well.

World of Tanks was a lot of fun in open beta and before the official launch, but it didn't make much sense either. There was no community warfare, there was no tiered battles, the grind was really painful and PUGs were a mess as they are here. With the difference that you could sneak behind an enemy tank only to tickle it for zero damage because of "realism". Basically, you could be utterly useless unless you endured long enough to get a "high end" tank. I think your experience is valid, but it's definitely  conditioned by your Word of Tanks' one. There is NO "end game" mech (as you call it) here, and the fact that you think there is comes from misunderstanding Mechwarrior based on your history with the other game.

[5150]

Okay everybody, listen up - this is important.

The upcoming patch brings with it dramatic changes in the way your mech will interact with sloped ground. Gone are the days of running up a 75° slope as though it was no more than a gentle incline. Mechs will now have to work harder to climb slopes, and the threshold at which slopes cease to be traversable will be considerably lower than it was before.

In this post I will explain exactly how these changes will affect each type of mech, and we will include color-coded maps depicting the severity of the slopes in every level so that we can all have a reference as to where our mechs can go, where our mechs can't go, and where we can expect the mechs to slow down.

For the purposes of these movement changes, there are five movement archetypes. Each one has a different threshold at which its Mechs will begin to slow down. I'll call this SlowdownAngle. The SlowdownAngle is different for each archetype. Here is a list of the archetypes, and which mech belongs in which archetype. You will notice that the archetype does not necessarily coincide with the mech's weight class.

Tiny: Jenner, Commando, Spider
SlowdownAngle: 40°

Small: Raven, Cicada
SlowdownAngle: 35°

Medium: Blackjack, Centurion, Dragon, JagerMech, Trebuchet, Cataphract, Hunchback
SlowdownAngle: 30°

Large: Quickdraw, Stalker, Awesome, Catapult
SlowdownAngle: 25°

Huge: Atlas, Highlander, Victor
SlowdownAngle: 20°

So they completely missed the point of why some mechs are chicken-walkers (reverse-knee) rather than standard with regards to terrain!

[Lantyssa]

Well, the Cataphract is in the medium category, and the Raven's long legs wouldn't help move up inclines so much as move fast.  (Plus it'd be unbalancing, though I don't think the Jenner should be on the tiny list either.)

The Stalker also benefits.  The Catapult is the only one that seems out of place, but it's already a pretty potent 'mech.

[Falconeer]

What I consider important or interesting bits from the latest, underwhelming "Ask the Devs #41".

Strum Wealh: What are the plans and attitudes of PGI with regard to the in-game availability (or lack thereof) of certain BattleMechs (or individual variants thereof) that, in BattleTech, are generally or wholly restricted to specific organizations/units (such as the Hoplite not being produced at all in the Inner Sphere, and neither it nor the Annihilator not being available outside of the Wolf's Dragoons)?

A: You will however see some of this come into player through price adjustments based on faction availability in a future game update.



CutterWolf: Will the Dev team consiter using "Weapon Slot Limitations" as a game balancing tool?

A: It’s under review.



MeatForBrains: Are there future plans to match by tonnage as opposed to weight class? What are the pros and cons of this approach?

A: We endeavor to allow players to play the game however they chose. Putting artificial limits always tends to create other problems. Sometime it’s necessary to promote a more diverse ecosystem. In the case of tonnage vs weight class, tonnage is better for players, as they can field whatever they chose, and weight classes is better to guarantee match quality/equality. We’re working on striking a balance between the two.



Stjobe: What are your plans for getting more lights and mediums onto the field?
The current game is absolutely dominated by heavies and assaults, to the point where I'm often the lightest thing on the field - both teams included - when I drop in a Blackjack. I'd love to hear your take on this, and your plans on rectifying the situation (if you have any).
If I may make a suggestion as well as pose a question: I suggest you take a look at your reward structure; it's almost completely focussed on what heavies and assaults are good at, and almost completely neglects to reward what lights and mediums are good at - and the rewards we do have for things like spotting and capping are a pittance compared to what you get for dealing damage and killing.

A: You pretty much nailed it on the head. Rewards, along with expanded roles for lights and mediums, along with some limitations on drop weights, will all contribute to a more diversified battlefield.



Ilithi Dragon: Would it be possible to have the option to toggle between a paper doll and a bar graph display, like MW4 had?

A: We’re exploring this when we refresh the HUD after launch.



aniviron: How far from your ideal state of balance is the game at this time? It's a hot topic on the forum now as always, but I feel that the game is the most balanced it has been since the launch of closed beta, even if it has a ways to go yet. Are there many things that you still want to tweak? What would your optimal state of game balance look like?

A: Ideal balance would be a middle ground where most weapons, mechs, and equipment are very useful in specific situations, and weak in others. We need to tweak a lot of aspects still, so we’re definitely not there yet, but as you said, we’re getting closer and we continue to chart a course to a nice balance.



Papar: Approximately, how many people were working on this game during Close Beta and how many are currently? Are you satisfied with that number or are you planning to recruit more members for the team?

A: We started with a team of 10-13 and now have a team in the mid-40s, not including execs, admin, etc. We continue to add resources as we find quality talent.

[Arthur_Parker]

we’re getting closer and we continue to chart a course to a nice balance.

Closer my arse, game was more balanced in closed beta when they had 4 mechs right up till HSR went in.  If his opponent can aim, a light is pushed hard to kill anyone except another light, two mechs close to each other it's virtually impossible to kill one of them.

[Samprimary]

[Arthur_Parker]

Machine guns aren't bad now actually, same dps as a small laser, course you can't really move and have to face your target   but should be fun in a locust for comedy kills.

I just did 533 damage in one round, in a jenner with 3 smalls and 3 small pulses, damage not that out of the ordinary but it was all to one atlas.  Found him alone, bad aiming on my part while trying to dodge all his nasty weapons, him finally backed against a wall.  One on one is still fun if the other guy is pretty bad, it's sad how quickly you die if there's two mechs though.

[Kageru]

They're bad because focused alpha dominates over DPS. So lasers beat them out with 3 times the alpha and no ammo requirement.

[Arthur_Parker]

They aren't that different to small lasers now which is huge improvement if I actually cared about them at all.  Did you miss the standing still comment in your desire to focus on the alpha damage output of a small laser mech?    1 ton for ammo isn't much.

Edit actually you need well more than 1 ton, just tried a spider with 4 mg, 1 flamer, surprisingly fun, 217 damage but with 2 tons mg ammo I ran out.

[satael]

Had a nice game and managed to get 6 kills...unfortunately noone else in the team got any so it was a loss (couldn't stop the 2 enemies left from getting 750 resources)

[Kageru]

Got to see a game with a couple of 2xAC/20 Jaeger's.... shit just melted.

[Falconeer]

I was listening to the No Guts No Galaxy podcast and Russ Bullock, PGI President, said they are considering a solution so that PPC will have 75% of its damage in the pinpoint location, and 25% of its damage splashed and spread over different locations. That is on top of the internal damage scale for overheating that is coming tomorrow, and the heat penalty for boating that I am not sure if it's coming tomorrow or not.

[Arthur_Parker]

It's been months, ppc's & er ppc's are stupidly overpowered.

[Samprimary]

did some concerted research with the machine guns.

they are still rull bad. their dps has to be high enough to be worth trying to focus it on an enemy mech at range.

[Falconeer]

What's even worse about PPCs is that in a random PUG match things are better, sometimes.
But according to what I have heard, it's all insanely stupid in 8vs8 where everything that isn't a PPC boat or AC40, and one occasional scout, is useless. Anyway, there's a patch today which will nerf overheating and will make heavy and assault 'mechs easier targets. And then there's the proposed boating nerf and the spread damage for PPCs. It's annoyingly slow, but it's changing.

[Kageru]

It's pretty much like that in most games I've seen... Dual ERPPC Raven is fun but silly.

[Shannow]

I'll admit I actually had fun last night. Joined a lance on the TS server and ran around with my 4 MPL Cicada spotting for 3 LRM boats. It's rather awesome to target an enemy mech then see an absolute fuckton of LRMs land on him 5 seconds later. We won 6 matches or so, with only 2 total deaths between the 4 of us. Less CT coring it appears, and enjoying the variety of mechs you see out there now. Still could use a few more maps.  Going to be verrrrry interesting when those new movement restrictions go in.

[Falconeer]

Almost forgot: nerf seismic. Now.

[Hoax]

[Ironwood]

Almost forgot: nerf seismic. Now.

I don't get the hate for this.